And because incandescens is talking about Dracula, and I have never read Dracula, so I have no notion who everyone is, I rescued the coverless copy of Dracula from the Weefree Library across the street. It's also missing the end pages as well, but from context I deduce that Dracula has been dealt with by that point.

I remember it was on my reading list of "classic books" in my early teens imposed by my parents after I'd been reading nothing but trashy sword and sorcery / sci-fi / Doctor Who novelisations. Probably to sweeten the pot a bit, but even so.

It also features a female character making a major contribution to plot resolution by actually compiling other people's narratives and doing secretarial/organisational work. For all the modern versions of the narrative which try to cast Mina as "saving the day by virtue of her true love", she does a lot more here to save the day by office work.

I do remember bogging down in Thucydides. Herodotus was much more interesting.

Though when we were actually translating Greek at school years later, I actually quite liked him (he was one of the set texts) - his sentence construction and grammar were reasonably straightforward, as I remember it.